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Marketing in Hollywood is often seen through a lens of huge budgets, splashy red carpets and soaring advertisements. But any marketer in show business will tell you that, when it comes to selling a film or series, ground
game is just as important. That premise is crucial to the business model of SGG Media, an upstart agency which represents an army of social media accounts catering to verticals like athletics and lifestyle. Founded by 28-year-old Troy Paul, SGG occupies a subtle but increasingly powerful space for entertainment marketing – one that amplifies content across a network of roughly 3,000 “micro-influencers,” whose combined reach is an estimated 270 million eyeballs. Over half of those accounts are obsessively devoted to sports, from pages that follow leagues and teams, geographic markets and niche fandoms. Their philosophy is simple: sports culture is pop culture. Many major studios agree and have joined SGG as clients over the past 3 years (Amazon MGM, A24, Universal, Paramount, Lionsgate and Sony Pictures) across titles including “The Odyssey,” “Scary Movie” and “Anaconda.” A bench of premium advisors doesn’t hurt either. Former Imagine Entertainment co-chair Michael Rosenberg joined the SGG board last October, along with audience guru Kevin Goetz and “Little Miss Sunshine” producer Daivd Friendly. Paul conceived SGG Media as a senior at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, Calif., and thinks social media marketing is undergoing a paradigm shift. “We’re moving away from high-production user generated content to amplification models. A few years ago, a major studio would produce a commercial with a celebrity, post it on Instagram and pray it goes viral organically. That, or spend on Meta and X ads to boost it,” Paul said. “Now, an agency like SGG can amplify a spot in real time to accounts from authoritative influencers followed by real fans.” SGG’s methods fall into the hot-button issue of “clipping,” highly prevalent in the music industry, where only the most attention-grabbing segments of content are promoted to gain wide attention. Paul says the days of major spends on paid media are falling out of fashion, and his micro-influencers – many of whom do not appear on camera or promote themselves as central to their accounts – can win by dictating what’s relevant to their followers and sharing it as a hive. These methods are also “financially prudent” for the studios, Goetz told Variety, and go a long way to winning the trust of Gen Z and the rising Gen Alpha (the ones driving the box office, numerous research reports and exit data has proven in recent years). “Authenticity is so very important to young people in what they watch, read and interact with. It must come from a source that’s trusted, and a sponsored ad does not fall under that category no matter how you slice it,” says Goetz, founder and CEO of entertainment research firm Screen Engine. “Gen Z and the upcoming Alphas are cynical. They’ve grown up in a world of tremendous polarization, seeing a country divided and having little trust in government and corporations. They’re aware that they’re being sold everything under the sun.” As the agency continues to expand, Paul is currently seeking content veterans from legacy media to help solidify SGG’s place in the new ecosystem of social marketing. When you have the ball, many sports teach us, you keep running.
